The Pedestrians

Rachel Zucker returns to themes of motherhood, marriage, and the life of an artist in this double collection of poems. FABLES, written in prose form, shows the reader different settings (mountains, ocean, Paris) of Zucker's travels and meditations on place. THE PEDESTRIANS brings us back to her native New York and the daily frustrations of a woman torn by obligations.

Chicago Tribune's best poetry books of 2014The New Yorker's best poetry books of 2014

Zucker's name-naming, carping, merciless, and gloriously human body of work thus far suggests that any full account of being an individual has to register how specimen-like and interchangeable our lives often seem. Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker

This self-described “woefully feminine” collection from Zucker is marked by a frayed, neurotic humanism and composed with thrilling deftness and control. Publishers Weekly, starred review

The Pedestrians is a strong, assured, brilliant collection. And it's not as if Zucker is naive about her “little flicker-self trumped up somehow.” Her clean, tempered prose style is an ideal delivery system for her weaponized observations.Chicago Tribune

Zucker unflinchingly depicts the vicissitudes of one woman's variegated perception and so creates a new documentary poetics of motherhood: uncensored, relentless, and surreal. She proves that the maternal mundane is not in fact mundane at all.Chloe Garcia Roberts, Boston Review

[Zucker's] best writing is nothing if not uncomfortable. If you know that discomfort already, you might see yourself in the best parts of Zucker's poems.Stephen Burt, Bookforum

Zucker’s stylistic choices here, to dance between prose and poem, between family vacations and the squabbles of everyday life, between the pedestrian and the city she lives in, are compelling and worth examining closely.Jeannine Hall Gailey, The Rumpus

With a group of confessional lyrics that reveal dreams, city life, sex, love and parenthood... Zucker reminds us how wild contemporary poetry gets when it spends Saturday nights at home. Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR

These diary-like, mostly dark prose poems focus on the events of daily life yet never seem real. The closest they get is a kind of Daliesque quality with the iconic watch melting in the poetic desert.Diane Scharper, Library Journal

The Pedestrians as a whole moves naturally from the external world of cities to more intimate, internal nadirs and so illustrates the psychological depth that Zucker has found within our seemingly pedestrian contemporary lives.Scott Riley, The Volta Blog

The Pedestrians is, in most ways, a book about small things, but its effect is not a small one at all. It may even be epic.Kathleen Rooney, Coldfront

In Zucker’s dynamic, the poet’s personality goes extinct as it bleeds into the world around her. She makes the world beautiful by giving it her own beauty, so poetry becomes an act of sacrifice.Jordan Sanderson, Heavy Feather Review

Zucker’s collection of poetry bears testimony to both her poetic brilliance and motherly ability to “juggle her family like eggs or oranges.” Her hybrid style blends prose and verve into one urban stream, rendering her poems “worth their weight in ink” (as she puts in in “pedestrian”). Her words reverberate like the roar of an empowered lioness, as she emerges victoriously from the city jungle of her life, a mentor to all mothers.Geula Geurts, Rain Taxi

Some of Zucker’s poems use breathlessly unpunctuated phrases sutured together by ampersands to present what feels like the anxious underside to the cooler, more obviously controlled percepts of [her] prose poems: the unmusical music of a mind racing through the harrying, sometimes horrifying particulars of the urban quotidian, and an unspoken protest against whatever “separates poetry from the pedestrian.” Barry Schwabsky, Hyperallergic

Rachel Zucker is the author of The Pedestrians (Wave Books, 2014) andMuseum of Accidents (Wave Books, 2009), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of MOTHERs (Counterpath Press, 2013), The Bad Wife Handbook (Wesleyan University, 2007), The Last Clear Narrative (Wesleyan University, 2004), Eating in the Underworld (Wesleyan University, 2003), andAnnunciation (The Center for Book Arts, 2002), as well as the co-editor (with Arielle Greenberg) of Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days and Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections (both from the University of Iowa Press). She is co-author (also with Arielle Greenberg) of Home/birth: a poemic, a nonfiction book about birth, friendship, and feminism. A graduate of Yale and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Zucker teaches at NYU and the 92nd Street Y. She currently lives in NYC with her husband and three sons and was awarded an National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in 2012.